Hi everyone,
Just wanted to give you a quick summary of my life since the last update. Sorry to all of you who patiently waited for this blog to (re)start again! I will do my very best to give you high quality contents that inspire you and make you think.
Well, lets start this update with a brief explanation about my professional experiences since last year. After this post, i will continue with more personal stuff and other interesting things that have happened to me this last year.
Nikko Citigroup
Well, as you may know, last June (2007) I started working for Fusion Systems in Japan as an Associate Consultant. Shortly after, I had my first opportunity to work on-site for Nikko Citigroup in Tokyo.
My first project (June07 - Nov07) was to help Nikko Citigroup (Business Technology Organization - BTO) to improve their Software Configuration Management. This is basically all the different processes they must follow from the moment they start writting code, until it is succesfully deployed into production.
We analyzed the software lifecycle’s procedures for all the applications currently in production, defined a unified method to be compliant with Audit Risk Review’s global standards and help them migrate all the applications into this new system.
One really good thing about this project is that I could interview all development teams in Japan for both Equities and Fixed Income, as well as teams in New York or Singapore.
My first experience with Citibank was very positive, not only because of all the exposure to financial systems, but also because I met really wonderful and talented people working there.
EMC - Citigroup
Last December, I was required to move to Singapore for a joint project with EMC (info). The client was again Citibank (info), but now the Singapore branch.
EMC is one of the biggest information infrastructure technology companies in the world, and they offer a very wide variety of products. Two of the biggest products are Symmetrix DMX (an extremely fast enterprise storage array) and Centera (Content Addressable Storage system).
Centera is used commonly to store massive ammounts of documents (that do not change often) in an archive system with a fast time response (compared to jukebox or tape). This is useful in more environments that I initially imagined:
- Security videos
- Voice message systems
- Official Contracts
- Government documentation
- and many many more areas…
Thanks to the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (Public Company Account Reform and Investor Protection Act, or SOX), all electronic communications are to be recorded for a period of time (typically years) for compliance purposes. This made Investment banks an important target of EMC and all Storage Infrastructure companies. I recommend a very good article about Why SOX matters in China if you are interested in the topic.
My project is to build a Cache System that increases the performance when reading or writting to Centera. I designed a C/C# application that interfaces with Citibank current systems and delivers Centera content with a substantial increase in speed.
Future Steps…
I will be in Singapore until early March finishing up the project and overviewing the deployment issues that might arise on production. After that I will return to Tokyo and continue with other projects there.
Guys, it’s a pleasure to be back 
